


Hell is for children

by Neurocrat



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: (Murder of non-canonical non-character), Canon-Typical Violence, Child Abuse, Gen, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Martial Arts, Meditation, Murder, The Chaste, Training, Training children to kill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-25
Updated: 2017-04-24
Packaged: 2018-10-23 19:15:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10725495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neurocrat/pseuds/Neurocrat
Summary: “The more experienced fighter,” Stick told him, back at the start of his training, “Gets to choose when the other fighter gets to breathe.”“I know that,” Matt said at the time, “My dad was a boxer.”He got cuffed on the side of the head for that. “No. You don’t really know it until you live through it, Matty,” Stick said, without emotion.---Scenes from child Matt’s training with Stick, as Stick tries to make him into a killing machine.





	1. Child soldiers

**Author's Note:**

> For Daredevil Bingo square “child soldiers”. Rated Teen for violence and for sad and more-or-less abusive child-rearing practices, not for sex.

Matt has made progress.

They spar, and this time, he manages to block everything Stick throws at him. Matt is breathing hard at the end of two minutes, but he’s not heaving. Not like at the beginning, when Stick would quickly get him to a point of not being able to breathe at all.

“The more experienced fighter,” Stick told him, back at the start of his training, “Gets to choose when the other fighter gets to breathe.”

“I know that,” Matt said at the time, “My dad was a boxer.”

He got cuffed on the side of the head for that. “No. You don’t really know it until you live through it, Matty,” Stick said, without emotion.

Now, he knows it, really knows it. He’s been working so hard at taking his breath back from Stick.

Before Matt fully recovers, Stick starts another bout. It’s late afternoon. They’ve been sparring for hours, and Stick has not allowed Matt to have lunch yet. Matt’s hungry, but he learned long ago to refrain from complaining to Stick. About anything, ever. And now Stick has been teaching him how to work with discomfort, work with pain, channel it into something else, some other kind of energy. Matt has gotten better at this, the more he meditates. He channels his hunger for food into hunger for besting Stick.

He reaches that state of flow where every moment seems crystal sharp, where all the edges are clean and smooth and he can calmly but alertly decipher what the next move should be, what the next three moves should be. This state of flow is not under his control yet; it comes when it comes, leaves when it leaves. He knows that, with practice and work, he will be able to bring this state on at will.

But for now, he takes advantage of it. He understands what to do to make Stick fall, to get him on the ground on his back. He is immediately over Stick, pinning him there, elbow to the pressure point in the throat that Stick has shown him. He senses a miniscule uptick in Stick’s heart, along with Stick’s wide smile. Stick is satisfied. Matt’s done well. It’s what he has worked so hard for all day.

“Good,” Stick says, as they both get up, and that one word is more reward than the huge bowl of sesame-oil-seasoned noodles with vegetables and tofu that Stick prepares for him, which Matt slurps down greedily, using chopsticks like he’s been taught. At first, Matt didn’t like the foods Stick made him eat. They were foreign to him. But they’ve grown on him, even the tofu. “Protein,” Stick has told him. “Adults don’t need very much, no matter what they tell you. Americans should avoid it. But a kid like you, training like you’re training – you need it right now. Lots of it.”

After eating comes the afternoon meditation. That was weeks, months of frustration at first. Sitting still was hard enough, even for ten minutes at a time. But sitting still without using the mental stimulation that Matt used to stave off boredom in the orphanage? The stories and games he’d play in his head. In the beginning of his training, he ignored what Stick said about letting go of each thought. He allowed the movies of his usual stories to keep playing in his internal theater. His dad, alive. Dodging the bullets. Leaving town before they could get to him, sending Matt postcards from different locations, until Matt is old enough to go out in the world and find him.

Stick noticed. He always notices. “Matty. You’re not even trying to clear your mind.” The tension in Matt’s muscles, his breathing, his heart, the other signs gave him away.

He rebelled, over and over, thinking his thoughts defiantly, getting punished for it. Hit in the back with Stick’s cane, slapped on the back of the head. Nothing but white rice and plain tofu to eat for days.

Finally, Stick asked him what it was that was so important to think about. Matt told him. Specifically about the stories in which he hunted down the men who set up his dad, the man who shot him. About making those men pay.

Stick was quiet for some time, walking slowly around Matt, where he was sitting on a square of carpet on the cement floor. Matt sensed Stick nodding, using the focus he was already learning to hear and feel the movement, the changes in the shape of Stick.

“You know you will one day be able to get those men,” Stick said. “You will be able to do what you like with them. That story in your head can come true.”

Stick stopped his pacing, leaned down over Matt until Matt could feel Stick’s breath on the top of his head.

“Only. Only if you train. As I’ve been trying to get you to do. Only if you stop fighting it, and work. Work hard. Not just on the sparring, Matty, not just on the moving your body. Train your _mind_.” At this last, he grabbed Matt by the shoulders, squeezed until it hurt. Matt knew by now to hold in his gasp.

So Matt learned to let go of his dad. Let that thought slip by and drift away on the stream. He let his mind be clear of thought, be clear of emotion, so that he could someday take revenge about something he no longer felt the need to take revenge over.

Stick returns him to the orphanage each night, the bed he sleeps in. That is the only sense in which the orphanage is home anymore. Stick gathers him each morning at dawn, before the other children are awake, and returns him just a few minutes before lights out in their quarters.

His real home is the training room. He belongs to Stick.

\---

Stick begins to tell Matt the real purpose of his training. It isn’t, of course, to avenge his dad. Stick could give a shit about Matt’s dad. Stick speaks of a group Stick is part of, a secret group of warriors. Their work is important. They have to oppose the other group, the group hell-bent on destruction.

Matt is training to be one of Stick’s warriors.

Matt wants this, desperately -- until he has improved at the skill of taming emotion, curbing that very desperation. He must earn this. Each moment of training, each lesson with Stick, leads him closer to being that warrior.

Stick warns him that it isn’t an easy path. Matt thinks of the bruises, the deprivation, the difficulty of meditation. But Stick doesn’t mean that. Stick speaks of the subsuming of the self, of one’s very identity, into the holy cause.

It resonates. Matt thinks he is already doing this, having let go of the story-telling about his dad.

But Stick says Matt does not understand yet.

Stick says that part of subsuming the self is learning how to kill.

Matt thinks, as dispassionately as possible, about the man who murdered his dad, and the scenarios of killing that man that he has practiced and practiced in his mind. Matt thinks he will have no trouble killing. He says so. Stick just nods, his arms crossed. Matt feels a tendril of worry: Stick is too silent, thinking too hard.

The next day, when Stick brings him to the basement warehouse where they train, there is an animal there. Matt smells its foreign smell and hears its soft noises, the scratching of its claws against a metal cage.

“Tell me, Matty, d’you ever miss eating meat?” Stick asks him. Matt has been having all his meals with Stick; he does not eat in the orphanage anymore. Stick only gives Matt vegetarian meals. Matt can’t remember the last time he had dairy, either.

“Yeah,” Matt says immediately, and adds “I guess,” because he doesn’t want to look like he wants anything too badly. Desire, the root of all suffering. Which does not stop Stick from using it to train him.

“Well, how would you like roasted chicken for dinner tonight? That sound good?” Matt hears Stick walk over to the cage in the corner, unlatch it, and bring the fluttering, cooing animal over to Matt. “Your only job is to slaughter it.”

Matt does not know how to hold a chicken. Stick puts it in his arms, wraps his arms around it. “How,” Matt says.

“With your hands,” Stick tells him. “Break its neck.”

The chicken’s tiny heart beats so fast. Matt can tell that it is faster even than its normal fast speed. He can smell its fear. There is a purity to the emotions Matt can sense on it, a purity no human being has. Simple, trusting, hoping, but scared.

Matt wants that roasted chicken. But in his mind, that’s just a food substance, abstracted away from the reality of this warm, fearful animal in his arms. The chicken makes small sounds and bobs its head. Matt knows how easy it would be, he knows he has the strength, and could do it fast. Tentatively, his hands move to the chicken’s head and neck. One could twist one way, one the other. One quick motion.

He feels the animal’s quick breath, the tremble of its muscles making its feathers ruffle. Matt draws in a sob, involuntarily. He wills his hands to make the twisting movements, to make the spine snap, but instead he is bending down, setting the chicken on its feet on the ground.

Stick makes a grunt at him. Matt raises his face to Stick and mutely shakes his head. His face is wet.

Disappointment is heavy in Stick’s voice. “Hmm, well. No roasted chicken dinner for you.”

Matt feels sick with shame. Stick’s judgment hurts much worse than the loss of a potential treat. Matt has failed. Failed at something much more important than losing one sparring match, screwing up a move, missing an opportunity to strike. Matt is not sure he can earn a place as one of Stick’s warriors now. He is not good enough for the cause.

Stick feeds him a bowl of plain white rice for his dinner that night.

\---

For a week, Stick barely speaks to Matt. They train relentlessly. Matt pushes himself even harder than usual, wanting so badly to earn back Stick’s faith in him, knowing that he can’t.

Then comes the day that Stick does not come for him in the morning. For the first time in ages, Matt eats his breakfast in the orphanage cafeteria. The other children look at him warily and mutter. The nuns cluck over him and try to get him to eat something besides hash browns and toast. But nothing else on offer is vegetarian; besides, Matt has hardly any appetite. Where is Stick? Is Stick so upset with him that he is terminating Matt’s training? Has Matt lost his chance to be a warrior for good?

After breakfast, Matt takes his cane and slips away from the orphanage. He has been to the basement warehouse countless times. He finds his way there. The door is not locked, and he is about to open it when he makes sense of the sounds and smells inside.

Stick is there with another child, sparring. He hears the grunts and connections of limb striking limb. He hears the heartbeats, one smaller and faster than Stick’s familiar rhythm. A pause, footwork and breathing, as the two break apart, size each other up. Then, the child’s battle cry, her fast footsteps as she runs at him and strikes.

The hairs stand up on the back of his neck at that cry. Her pure ferocity.

As quietly as possible, Matt slips inside and descends the stairs to the training area. He can get more of a sense of them in here; their sounds sharper and clearer, their body heat outlines giving him a sense of where their limbs are in space. The girl moves with beauty. Her strikes are precise, her blocks controlled. Her stances, where she puts her feet – never a stumble, always positioning herself for strength and stability. The sounds coming from her throat, though, are full of effort and emotion.

Matt listens, senses, entranced. He has never sensed any person as captivating. He wants to stand and listen to her forever.

The two of them finish their sparring session, and Matt feels them turn to him. He senses the girl’s posture of curiosity. “Wait here,” Stick murmurs to her, “Don’t talk to him.”

Stick walks over while Matt waits for him, still. When Stick gets up to him, he slaps Matt across the face. “I didn’t bring you here to train today for a reason. You don’t get to decide when you train. I decide.”

Matt flushes, humiliated at being punished in front of the girl. He resists the urge to bring his hand up to his face, and turns back towards Stick slowly, struggling to keep his expression calm. At the same time, he feels a sense of relief at the implication that his training is still ongoing.

“From now on, I will train you in the afternoons only. You wait for me in the orphanage in the mornings. You got it?”

Matt nods. He will not cry in front of the girl.

“Alright then,” Stick drawls, impatient. “Get going. I’ll see you in a couple hours.”

When Stick is ready for him that afternoon, the girl is nowhere to be seen.

\---

The next few days - in between bouts of sparring, while eating, after meditating - Matt knows he keeps looking at Stick with a question on his face. He wants so badly to know who the girl is that it takes every bit of his will to refrain from asking Stick about her. He thought he was mastering Stick’s lessons of dissipating desire and controlling emotion, but this proves too much for him. He begins sneaking out of the orphanage in the mornings to lurk outside the warehouse and listen.

He listens to her hands and feet as they move in fighting, as they connect with Stick. Once, he hears her kick him hard in the stomach, knock the breath out of him. Matt touches the door he’s listening at with his fingertips. How badly he wants to be as good a fighter as her, to win Stick’s praise like she no doubt is earning. He also wishes he could spar with her. She must be amazing to fight. He wants a chance to block those fists.

“I know you’ve been spying on us,” Stick says to Matt on a Monday afternoon as they eat their lunch together, and Matt freezes. He knows exactly what Stick is talking about. He carefully puts down his chopsticks across the top of his bowl. “I’m sorry,” Matt offers, calmly, waiting for punishment.

“You shouldn’t be doing that, obviously,” Stick continues with a sigh. “But I understand, you’re curious. And, well, your instincts are right; you could learn a lot from her.”

Matt waits. He doesn’t allow himself to hope.

“You can go back to eating, Matty,” Stick tells him, so Matt picks up his chopsticks again. Stick does not go back to his own lunch, though. Matt hears him tapping his own chopsticks against his bowl, his head tilted in thought.

“Thursday,” Stick finally barks. Matt chews a mouthful of food and waits. “Come by Thursday morning. Eat breakfast at the orphanage first, but then come here. She’ll be here, and she’ll have something to teach you.”

Matt catches his breath. He controls himself, does not betray a reaction, but he struggles to keep his heartbeat steady as he finishes his lunch.

Both Tuesday and Wednesday, he is too distracted with anticipation to perform up to his abilities. Stick throws him on the ground again and again. Stick says nothing – he doesn’t need to. Matt is disappointed enough in himself. But he is too eager to meet the girl again. It might be the only time, he thinks. After that, everything will go back to normal.

Thursday morning, he snatches toast from the orphanage cafeteria and eats it fast, hardly chewing, while he walks to the warehouse. He forces himself not to run. As soon as he gets to the door, though, he knows something is wrong. Stick and the girl are not the only heartbeats and heat signatures inside the basement. There is also a man.

Is this right? Should he even come inside? But Stick’s body posture and heart indicate that he is calm.

Matt comes down the stairs cautiously. The man is in the middle of the room with the girl. Stick is near the stairs with his back to Matt. The man’s heart pattern and smell remind him of the chicken. The man has an attitude about him as if he’d like to bolt, but Stick is in the way.

“Ah, there you are, Matty,” Stick says brightly, without turning his face away from the center of the room. “Great timing. Elektra was just getting ready. Any time, now, child,” this last to the girl. _Elektra_. Matt luxuriates in the knowledge of her name, even as his skin is starting to prickle with trepidation.

Elektra runs at the man with a growl from the back of her throat. Matt can tell that she hates this man. He disgusts her. Her footsteps are light, though, as she’s been taught, and her work is methodical and efficient. The man tries to defend himself, and he isn’t useless as a fighter, but his fists swish air as Elektra ducks and weaves. She gets two swift kicks to his ribs, and he grunts in pain. She takes out a knee, and he falls, yelling. A kick under his jaw, with a sickening sound. She rolls him to his back, her foot on his throat. His hands grab her ankle, so she takes one of them in her hands and breaks the wrist. The man screams.

“Alright, enough toying with him,” comes Stick’s calm voice. “Finish him off.”

Elektra pauses, her body tense in its crouch near the man’s side. Matt can hear her breathing, quickened gently as if from mild exercise. Matt did not get the impression that _toying_ was what she’d been doing. He hears her swallow as she takes his head in both her hands, and jerks. Matt hears the loud crack, the burst of irregular heartbeat, which then stills.

Matt couldn’t do it to the chicken. Elektra just did it to a person.

Matt is crying openly. He doesn’t care what Stick thinks, or what Elektra thinks. A person has just died in front of them. At the hands of the girl he had so admired.

Stick was making noises of approval for Elektra, but now he turns to Matt, squatting down to put an arm around Matt’s shoulders. The spare affectionate gesture just makes Matt cry harder. “Hey, now, come on,” Stick murmurs to him. “You think I let her knock off an upstanding citizen? Ellie, tell ‘im what that man did to you.”

Elektra is silent for a long moment. Matt senses the heat increase in her forearms as she clenches her fists. Finally, she speaks in a clear voice. “No.”

Matt has never defied Stick so openly. He is scared what Stick will do. But Stick only nods and clucks his tongue. “Fair enough, your choice,” he says. “Point is, Matty, that man deserved to die. And Ellie brought him what he deserved. She did the world a favor, Matty. She even did _him_ a favor.

“That’s what is asked of us, being part of The Chaste,” Stick continues. This is the first time Matt has heard that name, too – the name of the secret order. An hour ago, what Matt would have given to know it. Now, it just makes him feel sick to be tied that closer to what Stick is, what Stick would have him become.

Stick tells Elektra to wait for him, and walks Matt back to the orphanage. That afternoon, Matt doesn’t train. Stick gives him his first day off.

\---

Matt’s training resumes the next day, and Matt does not talk with Stick about what happened. The body has been removed, all but the faintest traces of smell of the man are gone, and those also fade quickly. Matt feels as though he has woken up from a dream. He forms a wall between the part of him that trusts Stick and the part that doesn’t, and he keeps thoughts behind that wall, where Stick can’t learn of them. He decides what he wants to learn for himself from the ways of The Chaste, and what he doesn’t want to learn. Outwardly, he is entirely cooperative with Stick. A good soldier. Inside, very hidden, is the mutinous part of him.

After he learns enough, he will go on his own, he decides. Laying his plans in his head as he lies awake in his cot in the dark. He will be his own secret order. He will belong to and take instructions from no one, no group. He will mete out justice his own way. He will not kill.

Of course Stick leaves him before Matt has reached the level of learning he wants. The mutinous part of him is not surprised, although the hurt of it wracks his body. But Matt is not deterred. He will train and practice on his own, as best he can, to keep improving his skills. He will keep meditating, every day. Most of what Stick taught him, he will use. Some of it, he will leave behind.


	2. Coda: Friendship

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Bonus deleted scene - counting for "childhood friends" square]

Stick sometimes takes Matt to a nearby park to meditate, in order to practice doing it in the midst of myriad distractions: sounds of people and birds and traffic; smells of car exhaust and the corner pretzel vendor and perfume and body odor and animals and trees and earth.

Walking back one day, they approach a family going the other direction. Two parents, a boy, and a girl. They are talking and laughing, both children eating ice cream cones. Matt trains his senses on them; he finds himself fascinated by their happiness. There are so many of them, together, loving each other. So many more family members than just him and his dad. Just him and Stick.

As he gets closer, he notices the striking similarity in the smell of them, father and son, mother and daughter. The mother, though, smells distinct from the son. Matt realizes she is not his biological mother. But it doesn’t matter to them. They’re a family, living and breathing and loving together.

Then, the boy is staring at him: Matt knows because of the posture of his body and head, and how he stopped talking with his sister and parents. The boy raises a hand as he approaches Matt and Stick. “Hi,” he says. Matt’s mouth opens as he tries to figure out how to answer. It’s like a missive from another planet.

He starts to raise his hand, mirroring the boy’s wave, but Stick yanks on his arm. “C’mon,” Stick grumbles to him. “No time for that.”

Matt obeys, keeping his head facing forward as he and Stick walk past the family. He listens intently, though, and senses the boy turning around after he’s passed, looking at Matt over his shoulder, watching him walk away. Matt knows the boy is a stranger, he will never know him, never be able to fathom what his life is like, with his parents that give him ice cream, that chat and laugh with him. But he saves away in a corner of his mind this connection he had with the boy, just for that one moment. That simple friendly wave and _hi_. The curiosity that made the boy look over his shoulder after him. Matt files it away somewhere where Stick and his training and his fighting can never get to it.


End file.
